The End of Exile by Solmaz Sharif
The End of Exile
Solmaz SharifAs the dead, so I come
to the city I am of.
Am without.To watch play out around me
as theater —audience as the dead are audience
to the life that is not mine.
Is as not
as never.Turning down Shiraz’s streets
it turns out to be sucha faraway thing.
A without which
I have learned to be.From bed, I hear a man in the alley
selling something, no longer by mule and holler
but by bullhorn and jalopy.How to say what he is selling —
it is no thing
this language thought worth naming.
No thing I have used before.It is his
life I don’t see daily.
Not theater. Not play.Though I remain only audience.
It is a thing he must sell daily
and every day he peddlesthis thing: a without which
I cannot name.
Without which is my life.
SELECTED BY LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA
A poem I have carried with me since I first read it and one that I return to often is “The End of Exile” by Solmaz Sharif, from her most recent collection CUSTOMS. The speaker of the poem is wandering the streets of her ancestral city, Shiraz, a city to which she has returned, albeit tenuously. The poem exquisitely depicts the losses we incur when we leave a homeland as refugees, or as immigrants escaping the devastations of colonialism, including political upheaval and war. The city itself remains, but it is lost to the speaker. It hums in a language which she is locked out of, making her “audience, as the dead are audience” to the lives unfolding in a place she cannot actually inhabit. Sharif’s use of syntax and negation refashion the language in which the speaker’s exile is experienced to enact displacement in its fullness.
ABOUT LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award, Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland and Letters from the Interior.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Customs by Solmaz Sharif, published by Graywolf Press, 2022. (Available direct from Graywolf Press • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself―its foreclosures, affects, successes―she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.
Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.” (Source)
ABOUT SOLMAZ SHARIF
Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents. She is the author of Customs (Graywolf, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. Sharif is currently an assistant professor at Arizona State University where she directs a Poetry for the People program. (Source)
Read more poems by Solmaz Sharif • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Follow on Instagram • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 70 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: exile • distance • absence • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
